Knoxville, TN was the first stop in a different US, away from the tourists and the big city life. It took almost a full day to get there from DC, with some intense weather along the way. My host had advised me to pack an umbrella, yet rain was still the last thing to come to mind when thinking of the US south. I met some new friends on the bus (hey Michael and Melissa!) and we spent the better half of the coach ride talking. Megabus kept up its track record, actually arriving well ahead of schedule. Tanya, my Couchsurfing host, headed to the bus station as soon as I told her we had arrived, and five minutes later we were off on a scenic drive around town.

My first impression of Knoxville was of a small place; a downtown of a few blocks giving way to green suburbs full of elegant, spacious houses all having large lawns and porches. It was already getting dark by the time we made it to Tanya’s place, and I mostly took it easy for my first night there. Nine hour coach rides tend to drain you of energy, even when all you’re doing is sitting on your ass the entire way. I made plans to meet Kim, a friend from a few years back, the next day. We had worked together for a few months in Switzerland in 2010 and had not met since, so were both really looking forward to it. Apparently it’s not too many foreign friends that make it to Knoxville.

The following morning started with a walk around Tanya’s neighbourhood and a bus ride into town. I stopped near the university to pay Kim a visit, and eventually hunted her down in her very own personal lab.

The rest of the day consisted of a walk around town – I felt I had seen most of it by noon, but then made a few more loops and found plenty of hidden spots which I had missed the first time round.

Kim had promised to take me out for a proper Southern dinner, and so that evening we drove to the one and only Cracker Barrel. Somewhat of an interesting mix between ‘the real thing’ (moose and shotgun on the wall, wooden interior, lit by lanterns) and ‘by-the-highway chain restaurant’ (I didn’t know it back then, but they’re everywhere, stretching all the way to New Mexico!).

While waiting for the food to arrive we both got addicted to the ‘Cracker Barrel game’, for lack of an actual name. The aim is simple enough – jump over your own pieces Checkers-style on a triangular board, and finish off with only one piece. Well, easier said than done. Fifteen minutes later, though, I had found the trick. And once you’ve gotten it, you can solve it every time. At least that’s the idea… right, Kim? The food itself was great – it was, after all, real southern fried chicken.

I didn’t hang around Knoxville for too long. I had no choice, in any case. My relatively short (four hour) trip to Atlanta was booked for the next morning, just about giving me enough time for another short walk round town. A day and a half wasn’t much, but it was enough to see the city. Knoxville may not have been somewhere to spend a week, but it was great visiting nonetheless.

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Country mode really kicked in on the bus ride down to Atlanta. I was practically the only male and only foreigner (i.e. non-Tennessean) there, surrounded by handbag saleswomen off to Atlanta for a company convention. Two of them, Ginny and Abigail, decided that I needed a crash course in being a true southerner.

And so, the list of interesting and friendly people I’ve met in the US continues to grow. Whether it’s on the bus, waiting in line for your burger, or on the street corner looking lost, you can rest assured that if you’re in the US it’s only going to be a matter of minutes before someone comes up to you and strikes up a conversation. That’s what I like so much about this place. Especially when they find out where I’m from (following the whole geography lesson, of course), that’s subject matter enough to keep the conversation going for a long time.

Driving into Atlanta, I could instantly feel the return to a big city. One with a high-rise skyline and urban sprawl in all directions. My host Max was waiting at the bus stop with a few friends, and as soon as I tracked them down we headed to his place. Max already had big plans for the night. A party was brewing, and a big one too in typical US college-dorm style. Small taste of what’s to come in a few months’ time. Max’s apartment was pretty spacious, and even then it filled up after an hour or two. It didn’t end there, either. His was just one of several apartments in a student housing block, and if you’d had enough of one party, all you had to do was move down a few doors or up a few floors, and join another. Too bad we didn’t get any photos of the night.

The next day was my only full one in Atlanta. It was a bit of a late start after the night’s festivities, but a full day nonetheless. Max was also hosting Ann and Marlena, two other Couchsurfers from the US, and I was invited to join them for a drive round some of the city’s sights. First on the list was Little Five Points, a hip artsy district with a real character of its own. Plenty of records stores, thrift stores and small restaurants.

The next stop was the Martin Luther King Jr. district, where MLK grew up, lived and preached not too long ago. Really interesting place with a lot going on, especially with this year being the 50^th anniversary of his famous speech.

My newfound friends soon had to head out of Atlanta towards New Orleans, to continue on their road trip which would take them all the way up to Seattle a couple of thousand miles away. It’s incredible when travelling how quickly you meet and get to know people, to the extent that when you part ways you feel as though you’re saying goodbye see-you-soon to old friends, rather than to the people you’d met barely 24 hours earlier. And it’s not easy either, having no idea when and where you’ll ever see each other again.

There were still a few hours left to my day, and I faced a crucial choice. Coca-Cola and CNN are both headquartered in Atlanta, surprising as it may be. Both offer guided tours for approximately the same price. But both tours also take a while, and there was only time enough for one. Feeling educated and all that, I picked CNN and headed there for an inside studio tour.

Just seeing the massive complex was already impressive in itself. Getting a close-up view of those newsrooms and backdrops which I’ve seen splattered across TV screens countless number of times was an experience like no other.

Once the whole CNN experience was over, I decided to head back to Max’s place on foot and see some of downtown on the way. There didn’t seem to be too much going on, especially for a city that size. I passed the Georgia State Capitol, but besides that and deserted office buildings there was little to see. It’s proven to be quite characteristic of the US that once office hours are over, downtowns and business districts become quiet, hollow shells. Nice to look at, but otherwise entirely void of any life.

The only thing left on my checklist was buying some food for the next day’s long ride down to Orlando. I stocked up on some quality Georgia peaches (’tis the Peach State, after all) and the age-old bread and ham, and was good to go. Next stop – Florida!

So it was time to leave NYC for my second stop in the US, Washington DC. My first megabus experience to get there started with a run for the bus, since it turned out that the ‘bus station’ was further from my hots’s place than I had imagined. I just about made it in time, with the doors literally closing as I stepped in. Once aboard, though, I was positively surprised. Clean, modern double decker bus with each seat having its own power socket. And enough empty seats to have two each…perfect! There was also free onboard wifi, which worked well for the most part. The only issue is that it connects using 3G, so no mobile reception equals no internet. Which actually happens surprisingly often in the US, even along major highways. All in all, though, megabus was definitely worth my $1.

DC’s feel was a bit hard to label at first, a sort-of is this it/are we really there experience. Especially after New York, DC was surprisingly quiet and looked and felt much more like a small European city rather than the nation’s Capitol.

My host Drew was working in Georgetown a few miles from downtown when I arrived, so I headed there to meet him and drop off my bags. With my rucksack out of the way, I headed back to the centre for some evening sightseeing. My first stop was Trader Joe’s, the creme de la creme of American supermarkets. Cheap yet quality food. Ive been told there are cheaper, and better places to shop, but TJ’s was a welcome change from NYC with nothing but overpriced and understocked Duane Reeds. I picked up some packed lunch supplies, a.k.a. bread and ham, and kept walking. Destination-1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for dinner with Obama. Or almost, anyway. I didn’t get to meet him there, which probably was for the better. I doubt he’d have been too impressed by my Trader Joe’s sandwiches, as impressed as I may have been.

The White House itself was surprisingly unimposing and smaller than expected, a feeling reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty in NYC. I mean, nice building and all, but the kind of thing that I might have stopped by for a second, taken a photo of (if even) and walked on, had I not known what it really was. And like at JFK the lack of visible security was not what I had expected. It was even possible to walk right up to the fence, stick my camera through, and capture a few night shots.

I met up with Drew again after a while and headed to his place. He actually lived out of DC in Arlington, Virginia, yet still only five minutes from downtown. It’s been surprising actually, for a country the size of the US, how often I find myself living on state borders. First the boat on the Hudson River floating between New Jersey and New York, and now this.

I was once again really impressed by Drew’s place, not bad at all! It sure must pay well being a waiter here. Over the next few days Drew gave me the best ever possible crash-course in US culture, by which I don’t just mean Slurpees and gas station hot dogs with their free chilli and cheese. He got me hooked on those (minus the cheese), sure, but besides that I also got to join him for Sunday service at the local church. The hymns, prayers for forces in Afghanistan, US flag by the altar, boy scouts collecting donations outside…just as expected.

We later got to visit Georgetown again, as well as the Arlington cemetery where most of the stricken Kennedy family, as well as 400 000 others, have been laid to rest.

Drew was working that evening, so I again spent most of it walking round DC. Some highlights were walking by The Pentagon on the way and seeing all the memorials around the National Mall. The Pentagon was almost another walk-right-up place. At least this building was impressive by its sheer size, and there were some ‘no photo’ signs around the perimeter.

The next day started with a visit to the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. It was Drew’s first day on the job at the nearby Conference of Bishops, so he dropped me off there early morning. The largest church in the US, apparently. Nice building in itself. Even better was finding a small chapel inside dedicated to our very own Lady of Ta’ Pinu!

I had a tour of the Capitol Building booked for later that day, which was simply brilliant. The White House may have been disappointing, but the Capitol Hill sights (Capitol Building, Library of Congress, Supreme Court) sure were not.

My whirlwind tour of DC was completed with a visit to the National Archives, housing the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights and Constitution. There’s so much more to see in town that you could easily spend weeks around. I hardly even got started on the Smithsonians, one of the largest museum complexes in the world. All of which are free.

But I was satisfied. For 3 days I got a lot done, and I’ll definitely be back soon. Till then, it’s down south. Next stop on the mega bus – Knoxville, Tennessee.

So the time had come for my ten-hour transatlantic flight. I had spent the past few weeks forming a mental image of my fellow passengers – what would such a long Ryanair-style flight be like, and what kind of people should I expect to be flying low-cost from Naples to New York? I was expecting a plane full of Godfather-style Mafiosi returning to the US after a ‘business trip’ to Naples. Reaching the gate at the airport was a bit of a disappointment in that sense – it was the average crowd, with a mix of families, American and Italian students more or less my own age, and the odd businessman flying solo.

Meridiana’s service was leagues ahead of Ryanair’s too. The comparison ends at the low fares. Free checked baggage, my prebooked seat with twice as much legroom as everyone else (without paying a cent extra, mind you), an empty seat next to me, two meals, and unlimited drinks the whole way. We had one interesting encounter before takeoff when the engines were started and shut down again within a few seconds, for ‘technical reasons’. We were informed that the problem had nothing to do with the engines though, and we would be on our way soon. Soon turned out to mean an hour, but otherwise on our way we were indeed.

The empty seat next to me thankfully did not remain empty for too long, because after a few hours of being entertained by my laptop and the free view out of the window, my battery was dead and we had hit the ocean. Along came Nino, my Italian-American friend-to-be, who had been evicted from his own seat by his sleeping son. Nino spotted me making a list of places I planned to visit in New York, and just had to comment on my choice of Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. I had read about it being New York’s authentic Little Italy unlike the touristy Manhattan one, and authentic it really was proving to be, since it was where Nino had grown up. He eventually offered me a guided tour of the neighbourhood, which I accepted right away. More on that later, though. We ended up talking most of the way to New York, and I got to meet the rest of his extended family which was also on the flight.

Touchdown on US soil at JFK came much sooner than expected. The flight definitely did not feel like the ten hours it really was. And the 5 pm sunshine coming in from the aircraft windows only continued the illusion. First impressions of the US – humid, hot, yet welcoming. Humid – seems like New York always is. Hot – NYC was in the middle of a heatwave which I had been warned about, but brushed off saying that I can handle it. Well, the joke was on me. The 40°C+ temperatures combined with the humidity may have felt good at first following the air conditioned flight, but after just a few minutes outside I found myself longing for air conditioning more than ever before in these past 21 years.

Welcoming – my arrival was far from the customs interrogation I had been expecting. I was certain I was missing something when I simply walked off the airplane, collected my rucksack, got my passport stamped, and walked out of the terminal building. Where were the hundreds of questions similar to those I had answered online, the bag search, and the sniffer dogs? Not at JFK Airport on the 17^th of July, that’s for sure. My passport stamper also wished me a good time in the US and congratulated me on my UCLA exchange programme. Nowhere else have I had that before.

I started wondering what my hosting arrangement for the night would be like when the border guard/passport stamper commented on my New York address. Well, that of my Couchsurfing host, anyway.

“Does your friend live on a boat?”
“In all honesty, no idea!”
(looks up warily for a few seconds, stamps passport)
“Fair enough. Welcome to the US”

I was to be staying with Leah for my first two nights in NYC. That’s an entire side story of its own (apologies, it’s going to be a long blog post!). When her name came up on my Couchsurfing search, I was certain I had seen it somewhere before. I opened her profile, and saw that we had mutual friends. It turns out she had been to UCM in Maastricht for her own semester abroad, and we knew each other at least by sight and through the whole network of Maastricht Facebook groups . Hardly in the US yet and already meeting people I know. Small world indeed.

But back to the boat. I had been warned that this would not be the ideal couch to stay on if I get seasick, but it was kept at that. So when I actually met Leah it was the first thing I had to ask. And it turned out my friend did indeed live on a boat. The NYC marina right in Manhattan was to be my home for the first two nights in the US. Honestly, what more could I have asked for (besides some air conditioning maybe)?

Leah may have set the standard pretty high, but the second New York couch was equally great (as was its owner of course, hey Donald!). Lower Manhattan right by the Hudson River, the photos below speak for themselves.

NYC is, of course, a one-of-a-kind place. It was a bit too much to take in all at once, but that’s fine since I’ll be passing through again on my way back to Europe. And with that being around Christmas time, heatwaves should be less of a problem. The highlight was definitely my guided tour of Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, with Nino and his friend Johnny. After 2 days in bustling Manhattan, it felt great to get out and have a more up-close and personal New York experience. As an added bonus, I also got to stock up on Mediterranean supplies which I later used to prepare dinner for myself and breakfast for Donald.

The two days in NYC quickly came to an end, meaning it was time for my first Megabus experience. It’d better be a good one…plenty more of those coming up!

–Side note: Yes, I’m now a grand total of three weeks behind on blog posts. Greetings from Panama. I’ll be catching up soon, but until then, you can see where I last checked in from here.–

Italy has always been one of my favourite countries to visit. It may be so close to home and so alike to Malta, but then again that’s exactly why I like it so much. Similar enough culturally to be a home away from home, yet different in terms of its natural environment and architectural style.

This time round, though, I found Italy almost too similar to comprehend. I’ve been thrown into an identity crisis as everything I consider Maltese and my own turns out to be not so uniquely Maltese after all. Taking over some qagħaq tal-għasel for my hosts in Palermo seemed like a good-enough idea, until it turned out that I was just giving them some more of their own daily teatime snack. The Castel dell’Ovo in Naples is scarily reminiscent of Gozo’s Cittadella and Birgu’s Fort St. Angelo. Not to mention that Naples also has its own Castel St. Elmo, which I unfortunately did not get a chance to see.

To top it all off, when the time came to leave Naples for the US, I wanted to make the most of my last chance to buy some authentic Mediterranean ingredients and prepare some ħobż biż-żejt, a traditional Maltese sandwich, for the upcoming 10-hour flight. In the end I did not have any time to shop, and had already resigned myself to enduring five months without the real thing. The next morning, though, my host’s mum offered to prepare some packed lunch for the trip which I accepted right away. Once on the plane I unpacked the multiple layers of foil and napkins, only to find – yep, ħobż biż-żejt. Just like I would have prepared it myself.

 

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Palermo itself is a great city. It’s characteristically chaotic with a large part of the centre taken up by a vibrant street market selling everything from bicycle parts to fresh fruit. Stalls fill up the winding city streets, leaving barely enough space for shoppers to walk through (yet of course ample space for motorcycles to whizz past – I’m still not sure how that worked).

My time there was limited because I was spending the night with the family of Carlo, a friend whom I met in the Swiss Alps a few years back. They live in a small town around half an hour east of Palermo, in a wonderful house with a view which I will not even attempt to describe. Carlo was still caught up finishing exams in Milan, but his family was extremely welcoming. It got interesting when I found out they do not speak a word of English, and my own Italian is limited at best. I can understand a thing here and there when speaking to someone from Florence. The Sicilian accent, on the other hand, is a thing of its own. We at least got the basics across (I think). Grazie mille for your hospitality, no cipolle, no aglio, no latte, treno domani mattina, e tutto va bene.

The second and final day in Sicily was almost entirely taken up by train rides. My next planned stopover was to be in Reggio Calabria on the Italian mainland just across the Straits of Messina. I changed trains in Milazzo in sicily on the way there to board the InterCity headed to Rome to do the one thing I’ve always wanted to do ever since I first heard of it – ride the Trenitalia train ferry. Though Sicily and Italy are only separated by 7 kilometres of sea (think of Malta-Gozo and just add on a bit), there is no other way across besides taking a ferry. Trenitalia, the national rail provider, came up with an ingenious, and as far as I know, unique, solution to the problem. Why not build special ferry boats, they said, which instead of boarding cars board trains? And that’s exactly what they did. The train arrived at the port of Messina, split into separate carriages, each was pulled onto the ferry, and we were off. No action necessary on the passenger’s part. You can even remain in the carriage and sleep through the roughly 30-minute trip if you want to, though I chose to leave the train and go up to the ferry’s top deck for the view. We reached the port town of Villa San Giovanni, docked, regrouped carriages, and continued northbound. Or at least the others did. I got down a few metres ahead in Villa San Giovanni’s station to change trains for Reggio Calabria.

Reggio Calabria did a good job at continuing the Malta parallel with its seaside promenade. I got off one station before the central one, at Lido di Reggio, and instantly felt as though I had accidentally returned to Sliema. The photos may not give the full impression, but honestly – same kiosks on the pavement, restaurants across the road, the entire city out for an evening stroll, even the occasional Surfside and Exiles below the promenade. The only difference really was seeing the lights of Sicily across the Straits.

My time in Reggio was not nearly enough to form a proper opinion of it since I had to continue onwards to Naples the next morning, but I had a great time there with my host, teacher and baker (hey Ahmed!) and the city definitely warrants a second visit.

The half-day train voyage to Naples was uneventful and surprisingly on time. I arrived, settled down with my hosts, and headed to the centre to explore the city. Thinking back, it’s amazing how much I saw in Naples and how I got a good feel for the city considering my very limited two-night stay. Couchsurfing with locals helped, of course (thanks again Antonio, Jorge and Guido!). If Palermo was great, Napoli was simply amazing. I think I might just have found a new favourite place in Italy, one which has the unplanned and chaotic charm of Palermo and at the same time the grand architecture of Rome and Milan (complete with its own Duomo and Galleria Vittorio Emanuele – though in Naples they call it Galleria Umberto I), all set in the stunning natural setting of the Gulf of Naples with Vesuvius watching over it.

Hey there!

Whether you happen to be a curious friend, worried family member, or interested stranger, a warm welcome to this blog!

I am writing [was writing – wifi expired before I could go online] this first post live from Trapani Airport, or more precisely, from the flattest of the not-so-flat benches which I could find outside the airport and which has become my home for the night after being kicked out of the terminal building at 1 am. And so, the adventure begins!

As a brief introduction, I’m a 21-year old student from Malta currently enrolled at Maastricht University, the Netherlands and studying International Relations/Conflict Studies. I’ve been travelling as frequently as studies permit ever since I was old enough to do so alone, planning a mixture of short trips originating from Maastricht and Malta as well as some longer ones over the holidays. So far my travels have been limited to Europe, but not for long. I’ve been accepted for a Semester Abroad Programme at UCLA (University of California – Los Angeles) from September till mid-December 2013, and so Maastricht University is shipping me off across the Atlantic to chart some new territory.

I’ll talk more about the upcoming trip in a separate post to follow shortly. For now, I’d like to share a bit of my underlying travel philosophy. During the past few years I’ve learnt a few major lessons which have come to shape the way I travel and which have made this trip what it is (or at least what I plan for it to be):

• Getting to the destination need not be a chore, a tiresome trip which by necessity must precede the actual fun part of the trip. Reaching the destination can, and to me should, be as much a part of the fun as anything else. Why, then, fly to Los Angeles the standard (not to mention costly) way via London or Frankfurt with a flag carrier? Why fly at all, if time is not really an issue? Why not, instead, build your own itinerary combining travel by air, land and possibly sea? That’s what brings me to Trapani in the first place, but more on that later.
• Linked to this, there is no need to have a single destination at all. Rather, once in a new corner of the world, see as much of it as possible. Why think of getting to Los Angeles as the aim of this trip, when uni does not begin until late September? Why not, instead, plan to visit as much of the US and Central America as possible before that?
• Thirdly, and probably most importantly, is the realisation and acceptance of the fact that we should still have faith in humanity; that most people truly are good people willing to lend a helping hand. You might think of hitchhiking and Couchsurfing (tracking down locals online and meeting them in person) as dangerous and unnecessarily risky, and you may, to a certain extent, have valid reasons for doing so. Yet after trying both out and using them quite extensively throughout my travels, I can report with confidence that never have I had a single problem. “All it takes is one bad experience to spoil everything” and “Someone wanting to deceive will hide behind good intentions too”, granted. As I said, you may, to a certain extent, have valid reasons for being unsure of such modes of travel. Yet I truly and honestly believe that we spend far too much of our lives worrying about hypothetical conditionals, the ‘what ifs’. What if a Couchsurfing host turns out to be a murderous rapist? Well, what if, yes. What if the person staying next door to me in a 5-star hotel turns out to be one too? I’ll leave the judgement up to you, but I feel much safer Couchsurfing than I do staying in overcrowded hostel dorms (though those can also be fine most of the time). And just for the record, there have been more cases of hitchhikers attacking or stealing from drivers rather than the other way around (thanks Ala!). No intention of doing either any time soon on my part.

Though I will be using Couchsurfing for most of this trip to the US and Central America, I have decided not to hitchhike for various reasons. Distances are far greater than in Europe and roads can often be deserted with sparse traffic. Besides, getting around by other means of transport there is so incredibly cheap. We’re not talking about a train ride with SBB in Switzerland setting you back €100 for a 3-hour ride, or even an hour’s journey with NS in the Netherlands costing €15. We’re talking about a $1 7-hour coach ride across two states, and an entire network of similarly-priced local buses covering most of Central America.

The bottom line; I try to travel as much and as often as possible, and remain open to meeting new people while doing so. I’ll leave it at that for now because La Bella Sicilia awaits. I introduced my trip and some of my previous travels in an interview with Cleo Freriks of Observant, so feel free to check it out here in the meantime.

A la prossima!